Month: September 2022

In honor of Aaron Judge of the New York Yankees hitting his 60th home run of the 2022 Major League Baseball season, tying the mark first set by legendary Hall of Famer Babe Ruth in 1927, I decided to call on the Midjourney AI artwork bot to create images of Ruth’s ghost sitting in the dugout and eating a hot dog—something he was known to do often—while watching Judge hit that 60th homer. The results where not exactly what I expected. In fact, they where anything but. Many of them were just downright weird.

I ended up making a shit-ton of these images, with many variations, trying achieve a desired result. I didn’t exactly get it. For one thing, the first batch of images only included Ruth without Judge. Perhaps the bot’s database includes many more reference images of Ruth, an iconic figure whose big league career spanned two decades, whose legacy has existed for many decades after that, and whose fame transcended sports, than it does for Judge, who is a currently active player whose has been playing in the bigs for only about a half-dozen years, and probably isn’t nearly as well known yet outside of sports. For another, even after rewording the prompt a couple of times, the bot was very finicky on when to include Judge—and often times, it didn’t look much like him.